PHPWomen Contest Winner

By

Gerard Sychay

PHPWomen.org recently held an article-writing contest on their Best Practices Forum. Authors of the two winning submissions each received copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse, a 1-year subscription to Linux Pro Magazine (which is called Linux Magazine outside North America), and the opportunity to feature their articles on the magazine websites. Congratulations goes to Gerard Sychay for his winning submission!

It's not called the Command Line Interface for nothing. I programmed in PHP for a long time without even looking at the PHP CLI. When I finally did, I started appreciating all of its usefulness and features. Now I'd say I use it almost every day.

In this article, I'll show you three quick tips that can boost your PHP development productivity. Let's dive right in:

`php -r`

Did you know you can execute a line of PHP with the -r option? Use it like this:

% php -r 'echo "Hello world!\n";'Hello world!

Note that everything inside the single apostrophes must be valid PHP syntax, so mind your double quotes and semi-colons. This has a number of uses. For example, how about some quick math?

% php -r 'echo sqrt(150)."\n";'12.247448713916

Or finding out what week of the year we're in?

%$ php -r 'echo date("W") . "\n";'26

Or finding out what day of the week Independence Day in the U.S. falls on next year?

% php -r 'echo date("l", strtotime("2009-07-04")) . "\n";'Saturday

Or generating a random number for the office raffle?

% php -r 'echo rand(0, 100) . "\n";'33

Sometimes, I just need a bunch of random letters and numbers. I find a random md5 hash usually does the trick:

I don’t know whether it’s really a shell, but it gets the job done. Have you ever wanted to test a small snippet of PHP code? You might have a small test script somewhere under a web server root you can quickly access. It’s a pain. With interactive PHP, you can test these right from the command line!

This isn't really a command-line tip, but you might it useful if you are on Unix. You know you can execute a PHP script by running php myscript.php, but did you know you don't even need the php command?

When Unix runs a script, it looks for a command interpreter to interpret the script at the very top of the file. The command interpreter line begins with the shebang string (#!). You probably have done this with shell scripts, but you can do it with PHP scripts as well. So, if you have a PHP script named myscript.php that looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/php<?phpecho "Hello world again!\n";?>

You can run this script by running the file name:

% ./myscript.phpHello world again!

(Make sure the file is executable.) So if you have an awesome PHP script that does some task for you, or a PHP script that deploys your site, you can put the script in your $PATH and simply call it like any other Unix command.

That's about it. There are a few other PHP CLI features you might find useful. For example, php -l will run a syntax check on PHP code, and php -i will give you output similar to the phpinfo() function.

PHP is not just for websites. Command-line PHP scripting has been around for more than 10 years, which makes the language and its comprehensive libraries eminently suitable for the toolbox of any administrator who manages web servers.

Most admins tend to use the shell, Perl,or Python if they need a system administration script. But there is no need for web programmers to learn another language just to script a routine task. PHP gives admins the power to program command-line tools and even complete web interfaces.